Can you find the Kookaburra?

Taken on the Jells Park Photowalk :: Seeing as the Camera Sees.

This is a good example of my new approach to handling a (big) batches of photos without wasting time and waiting for (slow) software. (ie bringing the fun back into photography). Taken from the camera card with Photo Mechanic (180 images, 90 pairs of jpeg+raw), adding metadata, select and rating the best (under 3 minutes) then pumping 40 raw files out to photolemur 3.0 to see what is possible (another 2 minutes for that to happen, time to make an espresso) Then I sat down (5 minutes later) and choose half a dozen photos to work on.  All I had to do with this one was crop the photolemur output. Voilà.

Then I used Photo Mechanic Upload tools to send this cropped image to both flickr and twitter (in less than 2 additional minutes)

For a couple of photos I will go back and take them into On1 Photo RAW and three sets of 5 images each I will take into AuroraHDR 2019. Even though I’m not under any time constraint taking the chore aspect out of culling ranking and caring for my photos before I can even start the fun of enhancing things, give to time to reflect and hopefully lift my creativity

PhotoFriday :: Saturation

Saturation but getting wet as well as colour

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Saturation

PhotoFriday :: Pink

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Pink

Some thoughts on using Photo Reference for Paintings

There is a lot of very misguided opinions on the internet and the use of photo reference for paintings seems to be getting more than it fair share of pretentious humbug. I suspect the uninformed believe it is cheating. Whilst I don’t suggested that photos should be copied in absolute details (I am convinced the resulting painting is then going to look very boring). I do however appreciate that having an “aide-mémoire” handy can help check on details of the subject, pose or posssibly atmosphere. However I don’t have great expectation that a single photo will reliably capture all the tones, fleeting effects of light or shadow and colours are typically flat. Photographers strive to capture detail in high fidelity, massive mega pixel dump of just a momenr but I dare to suggest this is not the “reality” an artist sees (when a couple of 4” y 6” snapshots may be more helpful).
Photos definitely solves the issue of translating a 3D reality onto a 2D surface and this can definitely help resolve perspective issues and refibe composition. But it is no substitute for being there and “seeing” (and experiencing) the place or subject. The act of sketching not only consolidates that seeing but also helps focus on the key aspects, and concentrating on those characteristics, colour, texture, atmosphere that later will bring life into the painting, that a photo only may lack. So I feel strongly that photographic reference is fine but it should be collected alongside some “plein air” sketches and observation, and more than one photo is better.

   

A sketch can also help you better post process an image to retrace what you remembered the scene, not just the lifeless RAW file. This is a clone painting (below) created with Corel Painter and a fair bit of manual input, it is a computer created painting not a traditional watercolour. I hope it illustrates that there is more life in this and the post processedf photo above than in the original photos (which aren’t so bad either)

Another messanger of Spring

Suddenly a bit of sun and many suburban streets are bursting forth in spring blossoms.

(Melbourne in late Winter, can be full of surprises)

PhotoFriday :: Wet

Cyclamens left in the rain (given the HDR treatment)

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Wet

Bad Hair Day

The return to cold and windy wintery weather has apparently forced a lot of the birds to ground. This galah suffered the double indignity of being photographed as the wind ruffled his head feathers. Then the image suffered further as I has a play around with textures, layering and boarders in Perfect Photo Suite 8. I’ve also had a play with watermarking, adding a little to alvin’s campaign to bring creative commons licences back to prominence on the social webs

Very Pink Sunset

It was a very overcast evening and then just for a few moments the sky was a delicious pink as the sunset.

Big Sky Sunset

220° panoramic, created from 18 images using autostitch.

Pretty in Pink

Known as common heath, Epacris impressa, is a very distinctive flower that flowers at this time of the year. It is the foral emblem of Victorian. Once vast heathlands would be covered in such blooms but alas it is not as common any more and most of the heathlands are covered by housing developments, highways and farms.

Hello from DaisyWorld

The warmer spring weather has bought out a fresh flush of blooms in my own little DaisyWorld (the more famous daisy world is a nice mathematical model created by James Lovelock to describe his Gaia Hypothesis . If you want a quick overview of the model try this flash animation.

QED: As in the mathematical model in the colder periods, the darker (coloured daisy) predominate this first flowering (only the daisy bushes that are flowering are shown)

A pleasurable pink

 
For PhotoFriday's topic pleasure

After the rain, a pink sunset

This is not a HDRi post processed image, but it was one of a set of bracketed shots. It had an -1EV bias (ie slighty underexposed), cropped with picasa otherwise nothing fancy was done. It really was a memorable sunset. This is also posted on flickr if you want to see see the exif details

beach jewelry